Thursday, December 1, 6–9pm: Audioville (4340 Rue Saint-Denis, Montréal, Quebec, Canada) will host a Digital Music Seminar featuring the new AudioQuest NightOwl headphones (above); Saturday December 3, from 1–5pm will be a special day at Fidelis High End Audio (460 Amherst Street, Nashua, NH 03063); while also on Saturday, December 3, with the door opening at 4pm, JS Audio (4919 St. Elmo Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814) is holding a Holiday Open House.

Editor's Note: in the main, Stereophile has steered clear of DIY audio projects, leaving them to magazines like The Audio Amateur, which was published by the late Edward T. Dell. But one of the exceptions was this 1967 article on the "Brute," a tube amplifier design by none other than Ed Dell. Note that the DIY competition mentioned by Gordon Holt is long closed to entries.—John Atkinson

There's a platitude to the effect that the road to Hell is strewn with good intentions. Well, we don't see ourselves as headed for perdition, but we must admit that we are surveying a rather impressive-looking junk pile of good intentions at this point.

My passion for listening to music through headphones is fueled by the enhanced sense of intimacy and extra feeling of connectedness I experience in rediscovering recordings I already love. You know the old audiophile cliché: It's like hearing my record collection for the first time. High-quality headphones provide a sharper-than-box-speaker lens that lets me experience lyrics, melodies, and instrumental textures more close-up and magnified.

For the past eight months, my headphone of choice at Stereophile's New York office has been a pair of AudioQuest Nighthawks. That's eight hours a day, five days a week, for approximately 32 weeks. Not eternity, but we've spent a good chunk of quality time together. The overall setup is comprised of an Apple MacBook Pro (usually streaming Tidal, Spotify, or Amarra for Tidal), an AudioQuest Jitterbug, an AudioQuest DragonFly Red, and said NightHawks. I suppose it's safe to say that my ears tend to jibe well with AudioQuest products.

Saturday November 26, Canadian high-end store Audio Excellence (661 Chrislea Road. Unit 1, Vaughan, Ontario, Canada L4L 8A3) is holding an all-day event featuring Bill McKiegan, president of Dan D'Agostino Master Audio Systems. Bill will be presenting the new Progression Mono amplifiers (above).